First Published 1989
This Edition Published 1995
 
For Susan (1952-1993)
 
Copyright 1995 DW Myatt

All seasons transcend
Since each day differs
Through its cloud and its sun.
 
In the wood, gold spreads
Slowly
Like the slow death it is
As every soft colour is returned.
Only pasture remains green
Below mist
While brown earth is broken
By plough:

Sufficiency is shelter itself
And the once reluctant farmer nods
As he turns with his bent back
Where sun rests
Between its hill and his home.
It will be gone, soon, this sun
Lost
While stars stare down the sky
Where for fifty years
His house has stood
Stone grey among muddy sheep-torn grass.

There was a horse, then,
To plough the steep slope
Of his hill: a different way
When even the village
Fifteen furlongs west
Was wary of all change.
 

But shelter is sufficiency itself
He knows
As he walks the short path
To his home.
There will be fire,
A son's warm wife
To welcome this leathery skin.
 
He is old, he knows,
Worn like the oak, and his path
Which three years of bloody hands
Tore from Her earth
And which each year She renews.

All rain can be smelt

In the wood, wind spins
Slowly, like Earth.
There is a mist, a mingling
While the fallen man waits among leaves
Like Her kestrel
For death.

Every wind is his breath.

Strange paths await
Where Thought, for once, is silenced:
 

In the copse, a ring of Earth
Where waits Erda's woman
Whom seventeen years have grown
To bloom
As a sapling from its seed.
Hot, the sun of solstice
Sweats her
While she dance.
 

No one sees her
Naked
Nor the garland of her hair
While she chant her horned god chant.
 

Her Inquisition lives
Still sweeping towns:
One messiah more or less
Only folk suffer when dead thoughts
Torment and tear
Each life from Earth
Like trees are torn
For Town.

Sun and sweat
Should wash away a Cause
Not rain of blood
Fresh spouted.
 

Strange paths await
Where hate, for once,
Is stilled.
 

Would the wise woman's chant
Still
This vapid change
Where every person is controlled
By tentacles of State

O Cernunnos
Bring us back thy joy!

Hot, sun sweat her
While she dance

Resting, while light grows,
I hear outside an old woman's laugh:
It was heard before
When the gabled street festered
From filth thrown down
And the lost traveller stopped
In night amid mist and cold
To be bludgeoned by bandits
Who pulled his teeth for the gold:
 

There is no plaque to mark his passing
No short history waiting to be told
Only the ghost
Lingering
Like the laughter.
 

Yet there was beauty
To make me believe
In the gods:
But she who shared my soul
Last night
Is gone, and I hear now not her sighs
But only the laughter
Only the growing noise of the city
As rain falls as rain can, suddenly,
In summer.
 

All ghosts, like magick,
Bring such a glimpse
When we who wonder
Become aware again
Amid the beauty and the burdens
That mark the path
Whereon we who wish to survive
Invoke.
 

Listening, I hear the loud rain
Call
Here where a cowering city covers
Preventing it seeding the naked beauty
Of Earth

Haunting
As the cry of the owl
Within the frost of night
When I walked to this stream
With no moon:
 

I saw your face as I waited for dreams,
Tired by my waiting:
You the ghost walking the path
Of my life.
Sun came, slowly, bringing
A little mist around the stream,
A spreading calm to make me stretch
And walk like an old man
Bent by cold and doubt.
Here in the valley no trees exist
To greet in wakeing this Winter's sun -
There is only frost-bruised heather
And fern, and a few suspicious
Sheep: no song
Of birds, only the timbre of stream.
 

Slowly, cold-raw hands
Transform a little warmth
From my dream:
How many more nights shall I need
To remember
Until I cannot forget
Again?

Dark comes like death -
Creeping, to most
Just as houses sprout
Where oak, rain-washed,
Once grew
And nightjars rested.
 

At night
This valley glows:
Cars come, beaming white
Below sodium light;
Screens flicker
And only small children
Are scared of the owl.
 

Winter touches only briefly
Each house and its heat
As people watch, lazy,
Behind glass.
 

Only the humid heat of summer
Seems real
When young men watch
And women unbutton their blouse.
 

Autumn's leaves never fall
Very far:
Always a broom or a fire
Where each house carries
Its scars
And every car its waste;
Even the louts preen loudly
There where neanderthals
Still nest.
 

The sacred trees do not speak
Anymore
Except briefly
When moon flames the night
Wind cries
And rain satisfies Earth:
 

But screens flicker
Houses grow
While dark comes creeping
Like Death.
 

Trees speak slowly, remember,
Like Earth
 

Even then a wise woman said
They who think beyond the Shadow
Of their Selves
Will live this understanding
Between the passion and the stars
Needing no more the possession
That binds the soul to Earth.
 

The wisdom saught will come
When we awake from our slumber
Not by words rousing us
But through a ritual's climax
Wherein the blackness is boiled
To a tincture
To reveal a star, a goddess
And our dream:
No more then those systems
That held us all in thrall
Since in sexual passion we caught
Such glimpses as sped us on
To where a Self was born.
 

But even then a mage-man said
Beyond!

Rain
And you have cried
So many tears
Because you were alone:
 

Sleep
And tall the masted ship came
Bringing, storm-black, your precious child home
Who wished without knowledge
The rain silence
That would to your valley
Be a young witch's spell
And spread its wroth to the waves.
 

Sea
And you caught in foam faces
Each arm as they rose
Clasping meekly another scream hone,
Deep down toward a cold
Welcome womb
That turned in tides.
Cold her sea wind
As you caught the cloud
That grew in your dream
And made you weave the white spell
Calling back Her thunder home -
Too late.
 

Warmth
And you cried and made sleep
Cling to your face each morn
When you could not wake:

Anger
That made you write
On round pebbles a curse
That wrote the end date
For another woman's tomb.
 

Home
And you drank in deep
The mist of Prolley Moor
To celebrate the return of your gods:
 

Sun
While you walked crying
On the hill
Hearing in the hail
Your dead daughter's voice

In the valley each rock
Is reduced by rain -
It runs, as small stones
Which will be soil
As I and all that I carry
Will be dead.
 

Was this valley a hill
Before water weathered
And each sheep trail was worn
Between fern and heather
And steep fern?
There are no people, today,
No noise lying like the dead crow
Wormed:
 

But there are gods,
If one knows where to look
And can tread the steep slopes
Of this hill.
 

Every road intrudes
Upon slow thinking rock.
Who tastes the silence that lies
As each Summer's green
Upon the broken rocks of rain?
 

Here, near Narnell's Rock
Where Thor's hammer struck
Many a startled tree
And where dead men lie like seeds
Waiting,
Is neither day nor sun
Rain nor rock -
There is only the essence that exists
Because essence must:
 

There are no answers
Because no questions can exist -
Just as I am the rock which is me.
 

Yet there are gods, still,
If one knows where to look
And can climb the steep slopes
Of this hill

In the hills
Where heat haze is scattered
By wind
Wisdom sits like the shepherd
Waiting;
 

No words suffice
While bleached bracken
Scratches beneath blue.
Nearby, heather sprouts

Where silty shales chewed
By frost
Crumble slowly like life:
There is no haste
Where eighty years of wind
Have twisted the small Douglas tree
Like this Peregrine twists
Itself in flight:
 

Somewhere a death
 

While on the road below
Two cars scurry
Noiseless like lice:
Soon they will rust
Just as I will be bleached bones
And dust.
 

Little endures
Like this rock
 

Peace -
This is mine, the longed saught for forests,
The tent, now hot, that leans
Toward the sun in expiation.

I am alone, bewitched between
Sun and storm,
Waiting.
 

These blistered hands fumble:
A broken pen to scratch away
And colour the space between each dream.
Last night I did not sleep, each
Broken twig and rustled leaf a dread
As I lay waiting for myself.
It was dark, and I could barely see
When I stood outside gesturing
To the moonless sky in anticipation
Of each friend who did not come:
I was alone, craving the brightness of dawn.
 

Peace, which is mine to create.
Yet it waits, this peace, within
The unmeasured hours: now useless, worn.
There is the walk; the tree-seat I have cleared
As a hermit should; the view. Perhaps
Some forgotten god will accept my pose
And leave an offering in words.
I will be alone, dreaming, trying to avoid
Again
The certainty of faith.
Tomorrow, there is always tomorrow.
 

Waiting, I have lost the meaning of myself
And remain transfixed by the space before;
Dulled, my head is crowned by leaves.
There is the walk - the waiting

It is raining
And I am watered
And cold
There is warmth in love
Which explains my wait
By this road while cars pass
Noisy in the shielding dark:
My spirit is not seen as it sits
On the wooden bench where hill
Meets valley sky
And where a standing stone waits
To whisper words
Of a language that has died.
But I listen, while rain falls,
Hearing your cry.
 

Always a dream or a memory
Lead us on
And we wait like children
Trusting in the spirits of the Earth.
We love unsuspecting
While they our lovers scheme,
Succour themselves on our blood
And bleed us dry

There is a sun as we sit
In the heat of a summer
On this bench as new lovers
Holding hands -
Transmuting all the dark days
The tears of our past
In the touch that mingles our auras
As they must be mingled to bring
The words of our waiting stone
Alive
Always this dream
Leads me on.
 

But it is raining
And in the rain I hear
Your spirit cry

Midges
Rising and swirling between
The sunlit hedges and the road:
Only a few high clouds to banish
The blue
As I stand in this lane
With only crow, dove and lark
To break
The almost sacred silence of Spring;
No noise, except
The songs of warming Earth.
 

No cars, lorries or coach
To spread the poison and the passion
That cities grow as tractors grow
To strangle trees of life.
 

The arms of the gate are broken
Wired in a sling
And I rest upon it
While sun warms and a slight cooling breeze
Brings more clouds to cover my blue.
The dew has not gone
While I wait whispering over fields
Ancient prayers to the wakening goddess
Of Spring -
 

Am I then Her priest
Who by waiting in peace
Keeps a little of her almost lost
Numen alive?
 

Behind - the squawking crow
On the tree of oak
Is answered by lark
While a distant village clock,
Hidden as the village in the cleft of a hill,
Strikes as it marks
A morning hour.
A solitary bee passes
Slowly it seems
To bring alive a dream
Of last Summer.
 

Drops of dew become strophes for the sun
As I move
Slow and squinting like a Fool
Watching the red, yellow and green
Change to re-change my blue .....
 

Yet in the cities and the towns
Money, speed, loud music and time
Like night-terrors, drooling,
Slowly suck all bodies
Of their blood:
For there is no Spring,
There

We who wander are drawn here
To this one place which is many
As water draws those uninitiated
Upon their illusive quest
For outward peace:
 

Here, where a dying leaf falls
To the pond in one of these few
Neglected woods where leave lie
Like flowers and mist swirls early
Sealing in this silence,
We the lost of gods
Are found.
Half-bare, the tessellated trees
Speak
Before their Winter sleep.
Such silence and speech were saught
Once.
 

But all trees die
Even here where the twisting ash
Does not spread its boughs
In shame:
They, the unreverent, have not yet unlearned
But live in speech and noise
Within each grossly lit infested city
Spreading forth to pick and break
The dying bones which once upheld
Their sky.
 

I am here alone again
As a mendicant to my gods
Because I am the seeping silence
As I am my quiet but sometimes frenzied
Quest for life:
I like water am a contradiction
Of suppleness and strength.
I remember
And because I remember
I am bound by honour to these sleeping
Gods
As water is bound as a stream
Which fills yet drains this pond:
 

Shall I then - under moon and willfully
In mist -
Awaken They who sleep
To balance through suffering
The unwise deeds of the many,
Bringing back thus the awe?
Half-bare, the tessellated trees
Speak the spells I seek